


familia y amantes

by SegaBarrett



Category: Better Call Saul (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Implied Rough Sex, M/M, character exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:56:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27158284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Lalo has a complicated history.
Relationships: Eduardo "Lalo" Salamanca/Ignacio "Nacho" Varga
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	familia y amantes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luneur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luneur/gifts).



> A/N: I don't own BCS, and I make no money from this.

He can’t remember a time that he ever went by his full name. Eduardo Lorenzo Salamanca y Guzman.

The Guzman comes in handy when he needs a fake name up North, but he’s always been Lalo, as long as he can remember.

Just like he’s not even sure if Tuco is the name on his cousin’s birth certificate or not. They’re pieces in a puzzle that have always fit, and even though Lalo has never outwardly questioned most of it, it doesn’t mean that he hasn’t turned it over in his head again and again, the whole Salamanca family tree with all its entwined branches.

There are quite a few things that Lalo doesn’t remember exactly how he remembers.

***

There’s a thing about the women in the Salamanca family, and Lalo first noticed it when he was growing up. They tend to get pushed into the shadows, but if you try to bite them, they bite back.

Abuelita – that’s Rosa, mother of Hector and “the girls” as they’re called, even though they all have sons of their own now – is good at smiling and looking proper in a dress, but Lalo has been informed from an early age that she is not to be trifled with, so God help you, and even He probably wouldn’t want to intervene for you at that point.

Then there’s the eldest daughter, Maribel Salamanca, who is Lalo’s mother. She had married a man who no one considered to be of any account who had left a few years after Lalo’s birth, being chased by gambling debts as well as Hector and an axe, and had never been seen or heard from again. As far as Lalo knows, no one has ever seemed to notice the difference.

Hector is next, always strutting around like a cock in a fight as long as Lalo can remember. Lalo has never seen him smile, but he’s caught a smirk every now and then. Even though he’s a year or two younger than Maribel, he doesn’t ever let anyone know. He’s the one in charge, and he has taken it upon himself to whip all “the boys” into shape, the boys being the sons of “the girls” since he’s never had a child of his own.

Or maybe he has, considering whatever Hector might get up to that Lalo doesn’t know about. There’s a lot that Hector gets up to that Lalo doesn’t know about, but Lalo figures most of it has to do with blood, rather than sweat.

Then there’s the younger two girls, twins named Clara and Alba who are the mothers of Tuco and the other set of twins, Marco and Leonel. They’re three years younger than Hector and they are known as beauties.

Their husbands both found their way to the bottom of the Rio Grande, and Lalo isn’t sure whether it was Hector who sent them there or the twins themselves. 

It’s a saying in the family to never cross a Salamanca woman. That the last thing you’ll see is the smile on her face.

***

Tio Hector always tells Lalo that he is frivolous, and that there is nothing he can do about it. 

“You’re the golden child for your mother,” Hector complains, in Spanish of course (he can understand English perfectly but always refuses to speak it on a matter of principle) then proceeds to bitch about Lalo’s hair, his clothes, the way that he walks. “She gets you everything that you want, this that and that, so you can be a pretty boy. I don’t want any pretty boy sitting in my pretty house. You understand?”

Lalo knows there’s nothing he can say in response. When Hector gives you a verbal beatdown, all you can do is take it. 

That doesn’t mean that he stops being any less frivolous, though. Because what Hector calls frivolous, Lalo calls cunning. And a cunning man is a man who stays alive.

***

Lalo builds a small empire of his very own, despite Hector’s yammering into his ear about what he should do every second of every day. After all, Hector's decided he can’t rely on Tuco – too impulsive, and maybe that’s even worse than frivolous – and he wants Marco and Leonel to be soldiers, not commanders. 

That leaves Lalo to pick up the helm.

So Hector begins to grant Lalo his eccentricities and his extracurricular activities too. So when Lalo sees Nacho Varga, he isn’t afraid at all.

He likes the way that he walks, the way he turns his head. He wants to grab Nacho’s neck and sink his teeth in, watch him dance in pleasure, or maybe in pain, he's not quite sure..

But it’s not until Hector’s stroke that he’s sure that he can actually do these things without looking over his shoulder, because now Hector couldn’t stop him even if he wanted to. 

He taught Lalo to watch his back. But Lalo has known that for a long, long time.

***

Lalo’s plan for Nacho to drive him to Mexico comes on the spur of the moment, but it’s all on the hinges of things he has wanted for a very, very long time.

He could let him go – that would have been easy enough, let him head back to New Mexico and his little operation and leave it as what it was. Just a momentary infatuation. An example of how “frivolous” Lalo could be.

But instead he keeps him. He tells him they’re going to drive all the way to Mexico, and he doesn't tell him he's going to decide how he’d like to play with him once he gets there.

He notices Nacho starting to fall asleep on the way, the way that his head lulls and twitches as he tries to stay awake. He’s afraid of something, Lalo knows, and that makes him intrigued. He wonders if what Nacho is afraid of might be him, or the Salamancas in general, or something else entirely.

“So, Ignacio,” Lalo begins, “Why don’t you tell me about yourself? We have a long ride ahead of us…”

“What… kind of things did you want to know?” Nacho asks, eyeing Lalo with suspicion. Lalo wants to laugh when he sees the look.

“Where did you come from, you know? Tell me all of your story… I like stories. They keep me entertained so I don’t drive crazy-like.” To demonstrate, Lalo sped up the car and began to swerve on the highway erratically.

“Okay, okay!” Nacho exclaimed, his eyes wide as he looked around, seemingly, for his seatbelt. “But you should, uh, tell me some stuff too. I mean, if we’re going to be working together… I feel like it should be a two-way street. Shouldn’t it?”

Lalo lets out an amused little chuckle. 

“You want to know about me too?”

“I do.” Nacho’s voice sounds nervous, and it should be.

“I’m a Salamanca,” Lalo tells him, “That’s what’s important for you to know. But I do things… A little differently.”

***

And he does. Lalo is a teenager when he discovers that he can both trust his family implicitly and not trust them at all.

He likes to play games – at first, games with the local girls then and games with the local boys. School is sort of an experiment that his mother sends him too, talking about how he could go “up North” to college and do something or other – it’s a different pipe dream each time she talks about it. Lalo goes from being an English teacher to an astronaut to a travel agent in the course of a week. The games don’t hurt much, not usually, but they leave many a starry-eyed local with a broken heart, wide eyes, and a sense of fear about just how far Lalo might be willing to go if whatever it was that tended to stop him short failed to act.

No one ever tells Hector about any of the things Lalo gets up to in the dark, and Lalo is glad of it. He would rather not find out what Hector wouldn’t tolerate.

He hears Hector yammering on, some days, to Maribel about what he would do to any son of his who was like this person or that who they passed on the street. Maribel always waits until he leaves to complain to Lalo that Hector has no sons, no children, no wife, and perhaps he should shut his mouth if he ever wants to get one.

Then she always tilts her head towards Lalo and looks at him, as if checking to see if she will report what she said back to Hector.

He knows she can’t trust Hector either.

***

If Lalo had his way, he wouldn’t live in a fortress with staff and guards scattered all around the house. If he had his way, he would always live like he lives when he’s above the border – wherever he feels like, doing whatever it is he feels like, freewheeling and free.

But there’s a sense of security one only needs in their own hometown, where people know everyone’s business and are primed to exploit it. Jorge de Guzman can get up to anything he would damn well please, but Eduardo Salamanca has a reputation to think about.

And the way Hector ensures that reputations are lived up to.

In Hector’s home, there are pictures all around. Most of them are of proud Hector with Tuco, Marco, and Leonel. A few of Lalo.

You really have to dig to find the ones of Hector himself, growing up surrounded by the girls. They’re inside chests and cabinets, hutches and dry-sinks. 

Hector is known for hiding away those who are not immediately useful.

And he’s even better at making sure people who have outlived their usefulness disappear entirely.

So Lalo lives in a fortress, so he can hide himself in a cabinet too.

There are some things that are better behind closed, locked, bolted doors.

***

Lalo always pictured living in a house with a fireplace, though he always lived in places that were too warm to have one. Even in the winter – it would get cold at night, sometimes, but not cold enough, but there was something to the idea of throwing a log on the fire and watching it crackle that had always appealed to him.

Four days before Hector’s stroke, the man asks him over the phone when he’s going to find a girl, settle down, “take care of business”, keep the Salamanca line going, since Tuco runs with a bunch of silly methheads girls and the twins don’t seem to have a head for anything other than taking orders.

Lalo considers the fact that maybe he could hop in the car and drive. Perhaps as far as Guanajato. Set up shop in Salamanca – it would be fitting, would it not? And then be free of prying eyes and nagging for good.

But that’s not an option, because Hector would not take the insult lightly.

Even now that he’s in a chair.

***

They arrive at the estate.

Nacho is looking like he swallowed his own heart, and Lalo can’t blame him. He’d like to explain about how he’s managed to harness those feelings to where he thrives on them instead of being afraid of them, but maybe that is a lesson for another day.

After all, now they are locked up tight. The fortress is secure, and Lalo is sure it always will be (so long as Hector doesn’t know the things he doesn’t need to know). So he can take time for himself.

He can take time to play.

“Come up and see this, Ignacio!” he declares, and he begins to show him around. He sees the veins pumping in Nacho’s neck and wonders how fun it would be to scare him, just a little. 

But now isn’t the time. It’s nearly the gray hour by the time his tour is complete, after all - neither night nor morning, and Hector is sleeping in some nursing home up over the border. And what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

So he decides that he will show Nacho Varga just one more thing. And he leans in, presses his lips to the other man’s neck, and feels invincible.


End file.
